Kelsey Friend and David Hogg recall the massacre

Another mass shooting — this one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. And so, the mass shooting news cycle begins again, a cycle so well worn that even to point it out has become a cliché.

But this time around, there’s a twist, in the form of David Hogg, a senior at Stoneman Douglas High who used his 15 minutes of fame to look calmly into a CNN camera and articulately suggest that it’s time for adults to start acting like adults, and to take meaningful action.

As he put it: “We’re children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action . . . work together, come over your politics, and get something done.”

No doubt the conspiracymonger Alex Jones of Infowars, who is surely reading tea leaves for proof that the shooting of 17 ordinary Americans was a hoax, will declare that Hogg is a crisis actor, hired by shadowy forces — the United Nations, perhaps or lizard people — to further a secret agenda.

No doubt others, less paranoid, will suggest he was merely parroting his parents, or a teacher, or liberal politicians. That he was simply relishing his moment in the spotlight and shooting off his mouth. That he is just a kid and can’t understand how complex the world really is. Heaven forbid a kid could make a trenchant point.

The usual suspects will attack this kid because he is saying something they do’'t want to hear, and because they know people will listen to him. They will attack him because they know he is right.

And they will insist that nothing can be done, that no gun control measure will work. They will dig up selected details to argue that gun control is a failure, that background checks don’t always work, that nothing can stop a determined bad guy save of course that fabled good guy with a gun. They will tell us there is no option but to stay the course, and arm ourselves.

We have a word for this behavior: childish. This is what kids do when they need to justify inaction: They insist that nothing can be done, that since there is no single solution that will entirely solve a problem, we must instead do nothing.

The fact of the matter is that mass shootings are a red herring. They seize our attention, but the 17 dead in this shooting are eclipsed by the shootings we mostly ignore.

The fact is that 96 Americans die by gunshot every single day.

These Americans die by suicide. They die during robberies. They die in premeditated murders, in gang shootings. They die when drunken disagreements over football games escalate to murder. They die, sometimes, at the hands of toddlers.

They die of a uniquely American disease: the habit of keeping loaded guns lying around. When they’re easy to grab, and easy to shoot, death and injury are far more commonplace.

We may yet find that nothing could have been done to stop the murders in Parkland. But this does not mean that nothing can be done anywhere. Everyone knows what must be done. The time to debate is over. It is time to act.

We know that universal background checks will help to keep guns out of the wrong hands. Studies are clear on this.

We know that safe storage will keep guns out of the hands of kids, as it ought also to keep guns from being used in the heat of the moment over football games.

We know that gun violence prevention orders, as implemented in California and Washington, can take guns out of the hands of violent men before they commit murder.

But change is painfully slow, because America is in thrall to the fantasies of its gun culture. Suburban Walter Mittys will continue to tuck pistols into concealment holsters and cast themselves as the heroes of their own diminished lives. They will persist in the blinkered insistence that nothing need change, for no better reason than their attachment to the gun as a symbol of embattled conservative masculinity.

The President, meanwhile, will continue calling for love and kindness, sentiments he has proven entirely incapable of simulating. On guns, Donald Trump is merely a ventriloquist’s dummy operated by Wayne LaPierre, who surely responded to his election by investing in a four-year supply of arm-length latex gloves.

Adults understand that no single law will solve America’s gun problem. Neither could any single measure eliminate car accidents. Yet speed limits, seat belts, drunk driving laws and air bags have steadily reduced the toll. Some people advanced childish arguments against those measures, too. Their arguments were swept aside.

On guns, that same infantile attitude holds sway. And so this is America today: a nation whose progress is held in check by adults acting like children, while their children go on television and behave like adults.